Sweet Comfort
by SabaceanBabe
Summary: Chuck's in a feedback loop of grief and self-blame; Sarah wants to make it go away.


"No!"

"Chuck?" Sarah reached out, rested her hand on Chuck's shoulder, felt the tremors that ran through him. His thrashing limbs had awakened her before his shout, evidence of another nightmare, a bad one.

"I'm okay. It was just a dream." He looked over his shoulder at her and tried to give her a smile. "Okay, a nightmare, but a normal one this time, not from the Intersect." He kissed her knuckles then slid from their bed and she let her hand drop. "I need some water," he told her. "Be right back."

Sarah watched him go. Intersect-induced or not, she was still worried. In her experience, run-of-the-mill nightmares didn't cause someone to wake up shouting, voice filled with grief and horror.

She drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs, listening as Chuck moved from the bathroom to the kitchen. After he shut off the tap, the apartment fell silent.

She waited. Several minutes passed before she heard him moving through the apartment again, but then she heard the front door close. _He went outside in his underwear?_ Straightening, she swung her legs out of bed; the floor was chilly beneath bare feet as she went to the window.

He sat in the courtyard on the edge of the fountain where a point jutted out between two curves, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Sometime during his apartment wandering he'd found a pair of jeans, their dark blue a stark contrast between the paleness of his bare feet and the white of his t-shirt. His shoulders shook.

Snagging her sweater from the back of the chair, Sarah opened the window and stepped out into the courtyard. By the time she stopped in front of Chuck, she wished she'd at least put on some socks, too, because the stones were a little cold. She reached out and stroked his hair. He didn't look up at her, but he did wrap his arms around her legs and pull her in to stand between his knees, rested his head against her bare thighs.

"I didn't mean to worry you," he whispered against her skin.

Dropping down to kneel in front of him, bringing her face level with his, she stroked her thumbs over his cheeks, felt the wetness of tears. "Your dad?"

He closed his eyes and his face crumpled as he nodded and she pulled him in close and held him. He shuddered in her arms, choked back a sob. "I killed him," he whispered, barely audible.

"Don't you say that." She leaned back a bit, forced him to look at her. "It wasn't your fault, Chuck. Shaw pulled that trigger, not you."

He laughed, a bitter sound. "It might as well have been me, Sarah. I goaded Shaw into—"

She cut him off with a hand over his mouth. "Shaw made his own decisions, his own choices. So did your father. You're not to blame for what either of them chose."

His lips moved against the palm of her hand, his words muffled, an argument or a protest that she refused to hear. She kneeled forward again, bringing her face to his and moving her hand away from his mouth, instead cupping his face in both hands. "You talk too much, Charles Bartowski," she said. And then she kissed him, cutting off anything else he might have tried to say by the simple expedient of sliding her tongue between his lips.

No further argument was forthcoming as he opened his mouth under hers, licked at her tongue. His mouth tasted faintly of mint and the salt from his tears. He pulled her in closer, one hand on the small of her back, the other sliding over her ass, his fingers seeming to burn against the bare skin below her shorts. Her fingers tangled in his hair and she heard the play of the water in the fountain before the roaring of her blood through her veins drowned out the sound.

He started to pull off her shorts, his fingers hooked into the waist of her panties, but she pulled back, stalling his efforts. For a wonder, though, he didn't protest; he was too busy helping her unfasten his jeans. Once his zipper was undone, she tugged both jeans and boxers down over his hips; he braced his hands on the fountain so she could get them down his legs. She left them bunched around his ankles, not bothering to take them all the way off.

Leaning in again, she ran the tip of her tongue up the length of his erection, brushed her teeth over the head, making him whimper. The sound made her smile and, just to see what other sounds she could wring from him, she sucked him into her mouth, eliciting a little gasp/moan combination. "Sarah…"

His hands stroked from her hips up under her tank top, found her breasts and lingered there. Her sweater slid unhindered to the ground as his thumbs rolled her nipples and she sucked once more at his cock before sliding up his body to kiss his mouth again. But after catching her lower lip with his teeth, sucking it into his mouth, Chuck spread his hands across her ribs, pushed her up higher until he could reach a nipple with his lips, his tongue, his teeth, tugging her top up and out of his way until he could suckle and lick properly.

Maneuvering carefully so he wouldn't stop what he was doing, Sarah managed to get her shorts and panties off. When she straddled his thighs, began to lower herself onto his cock, he couldn't maintain the angle, had to brace himself with his hands on the fountain's edge and slide forward a bit to avoid falling backward, leaving her nipple to pebble even harder when cool night air met wet skin.

Sarah shifted, causing Chuck, still inside her, to make a strangled noise deep in his throat, until she could get first one leg and then the other around his waist. She locked her ankles around his back, her arms around his shoulders, taking him deeper. They began to move together, faster and faster, the tension building with the friction until Sarah shattered around him, collapsed against him even as he spread one hand out over the small of her back and thrust into her one last time.

"Oh, crap."

A second later she understood as Chuck lost his balance. With his jeans and boxers bunched around his ankles, he couldn't recover and they both tumbled into the fountain. The shock of the cold water and the look on Chuck's face were too much for Sarah. She began to laugh and only laughed harder when the door to Ellie and Awesome's apartment opened and his sister called out, "Chuck? Is that you?"


End file.
